The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In the field of drilling acoustic components, robots with arms, or 5-axis machines, are used for carrying heads integrating bits disposed in a line or in a matrix manner. These heads are fixed on the arms of the robots or the 5-axis machines and each robot or 5-axis machine is programmed to place a head above an area of an acoustic component to be drilled, so that the bits integrated in the head may drill the area. Then, this head is displaced above the acoustic component according to a computed trajectory in order to adjust the time and improve quality of drilling the acoustic components so as to join another area to the acoustic component to be drilled of and carry out another drilling thereto.
Currently, the acoustic heads for drilling are achieved by disposing bits in a matrix manner, for example 9 bits distributed into three rows of three columns (3*3) or even 21 bits distributed in 7 lines and three columns (7*3). In this type of device, the drilling ends of the bits are disposed in a same stationary plane with respect to the acoustic head for drilling.
The matrix drilling is more efficient than line drilling but nevertheless has drawbacks, in particular the difficulties to align the ends of the bits in a parallel fashion with a non-planar skin and additional difficulties of managing the depth of each hole, or even the necessity of modifying the drilling head in order to manage reduced inter-patch spaces or according to the entry angle of the drilling head, or even the relatively low drilling pace.
Inter-patch means the non-drilled distance left between two adjoining patches (two drillings).
The difficulties of aligning the ends of the bits in a parallel fashion with a non-planar skin of an acoustic component to be drilled sometimes requires breaking the bits so that they do not penetrate too much into the acoustic component to be drilled thus risking drilling the acoustic component right through, this breaking operation makes operators lose a significant amount of time, and in addition is expensive since new bits must replace the broken bits once these are no longer used.
Moreover, the maintenance of such heads for drilling acoustic components is difficult in particular as currently specialized production operators handle these drilling heads, but should a problem arise, the operator must call a specialized maintenance team, which is moreover expensive and slows down production.